Hello! I’m Catherine, a relationships reporter at The Times, and I’m filling in for my colleague Jancee Dunn this week — which has been an exciting one for those of us on the Well team. On Wednesday, we hosted the first-ever Well Festival in Brooklyn, which brought together some of the biggest names in health for a day of conversations.
A lot of the talks focused on common cornerstones of well-being, like nutrition, mental health and fitness. But as I sat in the audience, I was struck by how many of the conversations touched on joy. Specifically, how essential joy is to building a healthy, meaningful life. And how to cultivate a bit more of it every day.
Here are three of my favorite joy-boosting tips that the panelists shared.
1. Reach out to your people.
Want to live a longer, happier life? Tend to your relationships, said Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who oversees the longest-running study of human happiness. That study has found that strong relationships are one of the biggest factors in people’s well-being as they age.
Investing in connection doesn’t have to be a heavy lift, Dr. Waldinger said, at one point instructing all those in the audience to take out their phones and text someone they hadn’t seen in a while.
“Just say, ‘Hi, I was thinking of you and I wanted to connect,’” he said. Don’t worry if you don’t get a text back, he added. It’s like baseball. You won’t get a hit or a home run every time, and that’s OK.
2. Embrace joyful movement.
Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, was in a remedial physical education class as a kid. So it’s surprising, she explained, that she has built a career around joyful movement.
Exercise can help us feel more inspired and hopeful, she said, and it “changes our brain chemistry in a way that makes it easier to connect with others.” The challenge is to find ways to move your body that feel joyful, not burdensome.
So give some thought to the kinds of movement that feel good to you. For some, it might be a challenging run that feels lousy in the moment but makes you feel strong and proud of your persistence after the fact, Dr. McGonigal said. For others, it might mean taking the dog for a walk.
“Your body will give you data,” Dr. McGonigal reassured the audience. Think about what you want more of in your life. Do you want to be outdoors more often? Play more? Make new friends? My colleague Katie Mogg wrote more about finding a form of exercise you can fall in love with.
3. Live every day like it’s your first.
Suleika Jaouad, the memoirist and author of a new best seller, “The Book of Alchemy,” was diagnosed with leukemia in her 20s. Last summer, she had a recurrence, and the advice a lot of people offered was to live each day like it was her last. But every time she heard that sentence, she felt an “intense sense of panic,” Jaouad said.
“It is exhausting to try to make every family dinner as meaningful as possible — to carpe diem the crap out of every single moment,” she said. “So I am done doing that. Instead, I’ve had to shift to a different mind-set, which is the idea of living every day as if it’s your first — to wake up with a sense of curiosity and wonder and playfulness.”
One way Jaouad, a committed journal keeper, tries to accomplish that is through what she calls “small acts of creative alchemy.” Recently she has been jotting down 10 memorable moments from the past 24 hours, stream of consciousness. She has been surprised by the things that have bubbled up.
“It’s always the small moments,” Jaouad said.
You can watch conversations from the festival here.
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